Ohai HN! I lead product and engineering for services and the project reviews system at Udacity - seeing this post gives me a lot of purpose to go to work on Monday. We are hiring engineers who are passionate about changing education!
Not the OP but I can tell you about my experience. I used to work at Udacity, both on engineering and content creation.
We for sure had engineers who were self-taught / learned using online resources (myself included). In fact, I hold zero certifications related to programming.
Over the years we recruited and employed a handful of engineers who pretty much learned everything they knew about programming through Udacity courses. Frankly, I always felt it was a very supportive environment for non-traditional engineers :)